Dr Caroline Edwards to Speak at the Open Science and Scholarship Festival 2025

We’re delighted to announce that our Executive Director, Dr Caroline Edwards, will be participating in the Open Science & Scholarship Festival 2025, organised in collaboration with LSE, the Francis Crick Institute and the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship. The festival will take place from 2–6 June 2025.

Dr Caroline Edwards will be speaking on Tuesday 3 June, from 2:00–3:30pm, as part of the panel discussion: "Scaling up Diamond Open Access Journals." She will present on the recently launched Open Journal Collective (OJC), an initiative that aims to disrupt the current landscape by offering a more equitable, sustainable and alternative solution to the traditional and established payment structures. 

During the session we will hear from the conveners of the collective to learn more about why and how it came to light, what it offers and why it is needed. We will hear about the experiences of a library / institution with various OA journal models including their interactions with commercial publishers, as well as perspectives from a journal Editor who, alongside the journal board, resigned from a subscription journal and successfully launched a new and competing diamond open access journal.

Speakers include: 

• Caroline Edwards, Executive Director, Open Library of Humanities and Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, University of London, UK.
• Chris Banks, Consultant, Community Trust Co-Chair, Honorary Fellow, & Retired Library Director.
• Arash Abizadeh, R.B. Angus Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, McGill University, Canada, and Associate Editor of Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs.
• Ian Caswell, Journals Manager, UCL Press

This is a virtual event, accessible online.


Free registration is available via [this link].

About the OJC: The Open Journal Collective (OJC) is a consortium of libraries and university-based publishers working to transform how academic research is supported and shared. Building on over a decade of innovation in digital publishing, the OJC aims to bring academic publishing back in-house at universities. A significant collection of diamond open access journals in the humanities and social sciences is set to launch under the OJC in January 2026.

Learn more: www.openjournalscollective.org


Read more: Academic libraries cannot afford to carry on with transformative agreements (LSE blog by Dr. Caroline Edwards)